Revenues at Trinity Mirror have dropped by more than £50m in the past year, according to the company’s half-yearly financial report.
The regional publisher revealed it made £320m during the first half of 2017, compared to £374.7m for the corresponding period last year – a drop of 14.6pc.
According to the report, the company made structural cost savings of £10m during the last six months “ahead of target”, and has now increased the amount of savings it plans to make by the end of 2017 from £15m to £20m.
The £10m cost savings included those resulting from the ongoing integration of the former Local World business which was bought by TM for £220m at the end of 2015.
The company also used the report to highlight the performance of three city news websites it has set up in the past two-and-a-half years – Belfast Live, Dublin Live and Glasgow Live.
It says the three platforms achieved 4.2m monthly browsers and 14m page views between them in June 2017, up on the 3m monthly browsers and 8.7m page views in December 2016.
It also announced that Football.London, which was set up in June 2017 to cover the capital’s biggest football clubs, secured 1.8m monthly browsers and 5.5m page views in June 2017.
Digital revenues grew by 5.9pc over the first half of the year to £41.4m, with average monthly page views growing by 9.4pc to almost 680m.
Simon Fox, pictured above left, chief executive of Trinity Mirror, said: “Whilst the trading environment for print in the first half was volatile, we remain on course to meet expectations for the year.
“I continue to anticipate that the second half will show improving revenue momentum as we benefit from initiatives implemented during the first half of the year.”
The report also revealed that the company’s chairman David Grigson has also indicated his intention to step down from its board of directors during the next calendar year, by which time he will have completed two three-year terms in office.
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Oh joy. More savings.
Happy Christmas, anyone?
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Incredible losses and it’s no wonder they’re conducting a wholesale audit of the commercial operation as no business can sustain losses such as these or the recently reported 21% loss this year so far, without making substantial cuts, let’s just hope it’s those responsible for the losses, those contributing the least or those on high salaries whos loss wouldn’t be noticed and not just the front line journalists as usual
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Would it not make some level of sense for them to stop closing titles and start trying to sell them?
They ignored the buy back that Iliffe had and missed out on netting £16 Million and instead had to pay a £2million break clause. They are now looking to make people redundant from Cambridge titles and having to pay redundancy costs!? In the year and a bit since this has happened Iliffe have gone on to spend millions buying titles from JP and acquiring KM Media so the appetite is there no doubt in some quarters so why close things when you can hand over all responsibility via tupe and possible make something back.
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Profit was still good, still made £62.6m, down just £6.5m. Not bad when they have set aside a further £7.5m towards the phone-hacking scandal. In total they have allocated £60m to cover costs related to the scandal.
In other news staff have been offered a 1% pay rise.
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“….I continue to anticipate that the second half will show improving revenue momentum as we benefit from initiatives implemented during the first half of the year.”
I think I’d be asking the sales managers why were there no initiatives put in place last year to cover the first quarter 2017 ?
Proactive selling not reactive seems to be the order of the day here
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Correction
Should read;
” proactive selling not reactive needs to be the order of the day here”
Or ‘ chasing your tail ‘ as it used to be known
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Doesn’t seem to have gone down too well with the City, despite the poor digital revenue result.
However, I suspect the main event is going to be on Wednesday when JP’s interims are released.
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That’s because they’ve let the papers run down so they’re now possibly the worst local papers going, which is sad as their titles that I know used to be superb, and the websites are shocking too. All the “Live” sites had the same completely non-local horsefly clickbait the other day, for example. TM should be ashamed of itself.
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Print revenue is about five times that from digital.
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